Looking for Mary Poppins in Kabul

Who’s who in Afghanistan? We don’t seem to have any good idea, but we are handing out plenty of money. According to the Times, Mohamed Salehi, the official who was arrested (by an anti-corruption agency we underwrite) for soliciting a bribe from New Ansari, a firm that transferred abroad billions of dollars (a good deal of that, undoubtedly, from projects we underwrite), and then was freed seven hours later due to the intervention of President Hamid Karzai (whose regime we underwrite), was also taking money from the C.I.A. (The Washington Post, in a followup, reported that Salehi, through his boss, denied the C.I.A. connection.) Follow that?

The multi-sided character of this transaction raises a number of questions. If every party was taking our money, does that mean that the payoffs evened out—that the whole thing was a wash? Or might it mean that we and our money helped to put the machine in motion?

The Times reported that Salehi was released “after telephoning Mr. Karzai from his jail cell to demand help.” Karzai leapt into action, denouncing the anti-corruption agency. What was Salehi’s leverage? According to the Times, it wasn’t the C.I.A.:

rather, officials say, it is the fear that Mr. Salehi knows about corrupt dealings inside the Karzai administration….

[An] Afghan politician predicted that Mr. Karzai would never allow his prosecution to go forward, whatever the pressure from the United States. Mr. Salehi knows too much about the inner workings of the palace, he said.

“Karzai will protect him,” the politician said, “because by going after him, you are opening the gates.”

So Karzai’s government is not only corrupt; it is susceptible to blackmail. Maybe we should be glad that this case appears to have been just about a bribe. What happens when the person who has leverage over Karzai is involved with Al Qaeda, and what is at risk is not money but American lives?

“If we decide as a country that we’ll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road—and certainly not at our behest—put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now,” the American official said.

Can we come home? That would be nice. The official continued,

“If you want intelligence in a war zone, you’re not going to get it from Mother Teresa or Mary Poppins.”

One often hears that argument—that Afghanistan is just corrupt, always has been, always will be. The implication is that we can’t make the place any more corrupt than it already is. But is that true? We’ve put a lot of money into Afghanistan. There is more than a quantitative difference between a policeman with his “hand in the till” and the buying and selling of an entire government, which warps our mission there. We’re not choosing between Captain Louis Renault, who mostly just wants to win at roulette at Rick’s (and extort sexual favors from refugees), and Mary Poppins. According to the Times, the money transferred out of the country could amount to two and a half billion dollars, which is about “a quarter of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product”:

Much of the New Ansari cash was carried by couriers flying from Kabul and Kandahar, usually to Dubai, where many Afghan officials maintain second homes and live in splendorous wealth.

The idea that it’s childish to balk at Afghan corruption—that it amounts to holding out for a magical nanny—is tiresome. Karzai’s interests do not seem to be our own; and yet we are pursuing a strategy in Afghanistan that depends on him, and puts American lives in his hands. On Thursday, Karzai was out complaining about the Obama Administration’s timeline for troop withdrawals. His national security adviser told the Post that elevating corruption over other issues “a joke. A bad joke.” A bad joke—like the one about the anti-corruption agents who arrested an official who may have been a C.I.A. asset and who called the President from his cell and told him to get him out of there? It’s not funny.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

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